The American philosopher John Dewey wrote another of my favorite philosophy passages in the last paragraph of his 1898 essay Evolution and Ethics. Dewey articulates in this paragraph what he sees as a monumental leap …
Everything Exists in Relationship
Things do not exist unless they exist in relationship with something else. In fact, things do not exist at all. Relationships exist. There are no individual things. The existence of anything is always contingent upon …
Art and the Evolution of Consciousness
Did you know that American Avant-Garde painters, writers and musicians in the 1950’s were inspired by evolutionary philosophy? I just completed a weekend program with a group that I co-teach called The Evolutionary Collective and …
Nature Mystics and Scientific Progressives
The European Enlightenment produced two responses; Scientific Rationalism and Romanticism. The Scientific Rationalism represented in the science of Sir Isaac Newton and the philosophy of John Locke. Romanticism produced the writing of Goethe in Germany …
Everything Exists in Relationship
Things do not exist unless they exist in relationship with something else. In fact, things do not exist at all. Relationships exist. There are no individual things. The existence of anything is always contingent upon …
American Common Sense – or – How to Change the Truth
The American mind has been constructed on a few obvious attitudes and assumptions about life. One is a pronounced idealistic streak. The Europeans that settled in this land believed that they were creating a new world …
Is a Dog Really a Dog?
One of the great philosophical dividing lines has always been the line that separates the particular from the universal – the unique from the general. We live in a world of both particulars and universals …
Into The Human Flow
I am currently completely captivated by the image of a Human Flow. The American Pragmatist philosophers developed a view of humanity as a constant flow of activity and society was a flow of flows. There …
The Evolving Truth of Pragmatism
In response to my last two posts a number of good points have been raised that I would like to start to address. Catherine has championed the idealism of Plato and Steiner against the Pragmatic …
The Self and the Social Organism
In my last post I explained that John Dewey believed that our self identity is a learned habit of identification that does not necessarily indicate the existence of any actually existing entity that could be …
The Illusion of Freedom and Thought
Inevitably if we start to talk about social conditioning the topic of human freewill comes into play. When you begin to recognize, as John Dewey did, that so much – if not all – of …
The Ego is Not the Cause of Action
The American philosopher John Dewey was against the notion that there is any entity that could be called an ego that is the cause of our choices and actions. Activity happens as a response to …
The Habits of John Dewey
The American philosopher John Dewey described social institutions, customs and norms as habits that develop in society over time. He is quick to point out that habits are not merely passive boundaries that limit activity …
Are We All Institutionalized?
We might be. I wanted to share some more thoughts as I read John Searle’s new book “Making the Social World“And one of the things that has struck me profoundly about social reality is the …
Emerson’s Process Philosophy
The American Pragmatists outlined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a profound evolutionary process philosophy. The view of reality they explored was one in which all of reality was seen as an unending …
We are the Conscious Part of the Universe
Now that I have got out some of my thoughts about the nature of truth I thought that I would respond directly to some of Chuck R’s earlier comment. (This is how this diversion got …
The Emergence of John Dewey
As I think more about the way John Dewey was seeing the world I can only think in terms of emergence. Dewey seemed to see the world emerging constantly as an interconnected whole, not as …
Dynamic Engagement with the Universe
I had the pleasure to spend last weekend at a conference dedicated to American philosophy. It was the annual conference of SAAP (The Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy.) During the three days I …
Cosmos, Consciousness and Culture
It was almost exactly one year ago today that I started this blog so I guess this is my first anniversary post. I started the blog because I wanted to explore the relationship between classical …
John Dewey and Cultural Evolution
What I see in John Dewey’s Instrumentalism is a compelling theory of how the evolution of culture can be consciously guided. Dewey’s ideas about directing the further development of culture rest squarely on his understanding of objects …
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